BITMOVIN - Executive Predictions for 2018

Containerization is my pick for the biggest disruptor in the video industry for 2018. This year we have seen a steady growth in the adoption of containerized computing across many industries. In 2018 I predict that this trend will gain momentum as video development teams start to exploit the potential cost savings and performance improvements that are available with software based containerized encoding stacks.

This transition will bring a lot of processes away from the cloud and back to on-premise, as architects build hybrid infrastructures using hardware agnostic platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker. These systems will incorporate on-premise hardware and public cloud infrastructures into massively scalable and flexible video delivery infrastructures. This transition will likely be the beginning of the end for dedicated hardware encoders.

Another area of focus in 2018 will be reducing bandwidth and CDN costs. This is an important topic for every content provider, and for that reason optimizing video delivery is already top of mind for most of the software architects in the industry. There are a range of solutions available today which can reduce bandwidth usage, including Multi-Codec Streaming, Per-Scene Adaptation and Per-Title Encoding. All of these will gain in popularity in 2018.

AV1 will be another hot topic in 2018. Early 2018 will see the code freeze and from there we will see a lot of companies incorporating AV1 into their products. I predict that Youtube and Netflix will be first movers and start using the new standard as part of their delivery and others will follow shortly to benefit from the bandwidth savings and/or improved quality to differentiate their service from others.